Innovating an established environment is all about CHANGE. And, probably, there is nothing as difficult as changing an environment where few are committed to change. If you're the CEO, believe you need to invest in innovation to set up a sustainable future for your company and think that by creating an Innovation function you've done your best ... well, probably no, that's not gonna be enough.
Such change is a cultural one, more than anything else.
The main mission of an Innovation function should be that of nurturing such cultural change and spread a new strategic vision among all of your colleagues. That's gonna be a long term investment. Your contribution as CEO is to promote such function with strong commitment and lead it by your concrete commitment and example. Change needs awareness and courage.
In an established company lots of good but also bad habits have settled along the way. The need for efficiency and dominating the complexity related to a growing company usually lead to a deep, structured hierarchy. The main consequence is that the distance between any individual contributor and the managers having the accountability to decide (e.g. to allocate the budget) has extended a lot. And the company has meanwhile lost its original agility.
Since the company still needs to support the usual, mainstream business (that which is financing innovation, as well), you cannot just "rape" the hierarchy you've already set up. That's where the innovation function might come to some help. Indeed, another mission is to shorten the hierarchical distance between individual contributors (or idea champions) and the high managerial layers, those in charge to decide about the deployment of any new valuable proposal. Doing so actually means that you've to become able to gather, classify, select and turn any simple idea to a project proposal in a very short time (no more than a few weeks, that's your differentiating value proposition). It takes agility and common sense.
Another short circuit to create, another distance to shorten, is about communication. Your function needs to become very effective at reducing the language distance between the problem solvers and internal investors. That means any new idea needs to be "translated", from the language in the feasibility domain to that of the customer/market's. An easy pain-solution-cost-benefits approach is gonna be effective: no more than 4 slides, which means a 5 minutes presentation.
Synthesis and communication will be keys.
DP
